Letter: Writer should return to role as top grammar cop

A recent letter by John Goswitz (Dec. 16) has raised a concern. The issue is not the content of the letter, which was little more than the usual Goswitzian laundry list of evils that beset the U.S. Nothing new there. The concern, rather, arises from disappointment that he has returned to his former motif.

Several weeks ago in the HTR a Goswitz letter appeared in which he took to task some of the contributors to the weekly Panel Discussion for their grammatical inadequacies. I, for one, hoped that now he had found a new subject requiring serious attention and that he would continue his quest acting as chief enforcer for the Manitowoc County Grammar Police.

According to his evaluation, it is clear that we are sinking into a quagmire (cesspool?) of fragmentary sentences, non-existent antecedents, misplaced modifiers, adjectives disguised as adverbs and sentences ending with prepositions. This situation cannot be tolerated. It must stop!

What surely must be countless other readers and I were overjoyed to see that at long last someone was willing to step forward and help put a stop to this assault on the sensibilities of the citizenry. Yes, our feet would once again be directed to the path of syntactic righteousness and grammatical purity.

Imagine, then, our chagrin at seeing Mr. Goswitz with his most recent letter revert to previous form and theme (Obama, Obama, Obama; Medicare, Medicare, Medicare; IRS, IRS, IRS; etc., etc., etc.). One can only hope that if enough of us prevail upon him, we can yet convince Mr. Goswitz to skip the politics and return to the job of Grammarian-in-Chief so that here in Manitowoc County we can sleep peacefully at night knowing that our infinitives will cease to split and our participles will no longer dangle.